cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53694832

The boom is set to produce enough greenhouse gases to cancel out 15 years of declines in power-sector emissions, according to a Sierra Club analysis.

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[–] 6 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

I wonder if there would be more public tolerance if new DCs were targeting land that would otherwise be considered horrible. I'm thinking places with historical industrial pollution unsuitable for other residential or commercial space.

How much complaints would happen if a DC was being built on top of a garbage landfill, bonus points if the DC taps the landfill for its methane to power the DC (many landfills simply burn off the methane in a flare wasting the energy)?

Would the public be against a DC being built on an old industrial complex polluted with mercury and PCBs? (the power question would still need to be answered)

I believe this is fixed now, but how about in historical Flint Michigan where the water being delivered was too polluted with lead to be consumed. A evaporative cooler in a DC wouldn't care about that type of pollution.

How about near productive natural gas fields where a certain amount of excess ethylene is burned, and if there is still too much ethylene, the well production has to be halted. If DCs could take that excess ethylene to burn it, it would make the natural gas field productive again.

In short, instead of targeting GOOD land, GOOD resources, have them target UNDESIRED land, water, and power sources.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    Brownfield development would be perfect for data centers, but it's slower and costs more.

    There isn't undesired water or electricity sources available at anything like the scale the AI companies want though; these things use truly huge amounts of energy

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago (1 child)

    There isn’t undesired water or electricity sources available at anything like the scale the AI companies want though;

    A solution doesn't have to be 100% perfect to be an improvement.

    Lets take an example of what I would consider a fairly advanced Landfill energy management site. Columbus Ohio SWACO (Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio) operates a commercial landfill gas (methane) recovery operation. Today that methane powers the municipal buses, garbage trucks, and snow plows (in winter). Excess beyond the city needs is fed back into the natural gas pipes and sold at commercial rates to residential, commercial, and industrial customers. They've been operating this successfully for 11 years already.

    The operation currently produces approximately 3,800 MBTU of methane daily. A high efficiency methane power plant (at 50% efficiency) would generate 557 MWh of electricity daily from that. More than half a terrawatt of electricity is certainly in the small to medium sized DC.

    Further, the landfill produces 26 million gallons of leachate waste water. This is only a fraction of the water an Open Loop cooling system uses, but its a current waste produce, and its already onsite in the exact same location as the landfill gas which potentially could be used to offset other water usage.

    Again, its not a perfect replacement for the land, water, and power, but its a very significant offset. A number of Ohio landfills are doing much the same as Columbus, and some are even supplementing with PV solar overtop of the landfill. If a DC was built on the Columbus landfill, the roof and remaining land could be covered with solar PV, and the recovered landfill gas stored during high solar production hours allowing even more gas available for electricity generation in the non-solar hours.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 52 minutes ago

    A single new datacenter in the pipeline from Amazon is going to consume above 7000MW. Landfill can and should be burned in useful ways, but it's not going to supply anything like what the tech industry is planning to use.

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